Letters off Flannery O'Connor

By Paul Gray

THE HABIT OF BEING

Edited by Sally Fitzgerald; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 617pages; $15

Author Flannery O'Connor spent most of her adult life with her mother on a dairy farm just outside Milledgeville, Ga., up the road a piece from Macon and a middling way from Atlanta. Her isolation there began involuntarily. At 25 she was already a noteworthy Southern expatriate and a prizewinning graduate of the University of Iowa's School for Writers. She had put in time at Yaddo, an artists' retreat in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., along with luminous fellow guests like Robert Lowell. She had settled down in the Connecticut household of Poet Robert Fitzgerald, his wife Sally and a brood of small children, working on a novel optioned by a New York publisher. Then she was hit with disseminated lupus erythematosus, a severe disease that could be kept at bay only with drugs and a straitened, cautious existence. She went home and wrote as hard as her reduced energy would permit. Two novels and a volume of short stories created a critical stir. In 1964 she was readying a second book of stories for publication when the lupus flared up and killed her. She was 39.

It seems clear that Flannery would have made her mark as a writer no matter where and how she lived her grownup years. She was born a Southerner and a Roman Catholic, and the vision that animated all her fiction came early: the infusion of divine grace into the lives of rustic, often grotesque characters who either do not recognize or cannot handle it. This plus talent and true grit guaranteed her status as an original. But the lupus made her a prodigious writer of letters as well. "Mail is very eventful to me," she wrote one friend shortly after returning to Georgia. "I never mind writing anybody," she told another. "In fact it is about my only way of visiting people as I don't get around much and people seldom come to see us in the country." What might have been frittered away in conversation was thus preserved, and this accident of fate leads to a startling discovery: the most memorable character that O'Connor ever got down on paper was her own.

She did indeed write anybody: old friends like Lowell, literary figures like Katherine Anne Porter and Walker Percy, college chums, priests, nuns, questioning students, aspiring authors, fans, cranks. She described her response to a flirtatious note from a man in Cincinnati: "I wrote [him] that I didn't think I'd like him a bit but he would be crazy about me as I had seven gold teeth and weighed 250 pounds." The diversity of her correspondents brought out her own.

Even those who knew her well may be surprised at the range and shadings of her character revealed in this collection.

Her dominant tone was humorous and self-deprecating. She liked playing the country bumpkin, sprinkling her language with "ain'ts" and "naws." Pomposity of all stripes put her on guard. When a pen pal confessed she felt uneasy about corresponding with a celebrity, Flannery reassured her that fame is "a comic distinction shared with Roy Rogers's horse and Miss Watermelon of 1955." Outside of writing and reading, her chief activity was raising birds, and she regaled everyone with anecdotes about them, especially her beloved peacocks: "I used to say I wanted so many of them that every time I went out the door I stepped on one.

Now every time I go out the door, one steps on me."

Behind this banter lay a keen intelligence. The literary value of her letters is high, not only for what she said about her own works but for her perceptive comments on others. She admired Graham Greene, with reservations: "What he does, I think, is try to make religion respectable to the modern unbeliever by making it seedy." Her comment on the Beat Generation writers was pithy and devastating:

"They call themselves holy but holiness costs and so far as I can see they pay nothing." She was proper but not prudish. "All these moralists who condemn Lolita give me the creeps," she noted. "I go by the notion that a comic novel has its own criteria."

Many of her letters dealt with her unwavering Catholic faith, and on this subject she did not joke. She read theology voraciously, not to test her own belief but to judge the theologians.

The materialism of the modern world appalled her: "One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation; that is, nobody in your audience." There was nothing smarmy or smug about her religous convictions. She found "external faults" with the church.

But she also cautioned a friend against excess criticism: "To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness."

She had cause to be bitter but never was. Her deteriorating health is either ignored in her letters or mentioned offhandedly. She had been corresponding with one friend for some time before she asked:

"You didn't know I had a DREAD DISEASE didja?" When a bone ailment forced her onto crutches, she called them "my two aluminum legs." The less she could do, the more she kidded herself: "My greatest exertion and pleasure these last years has been throwing the garbage to the chickens and I can still do this, though I am in danger of going with it."

Editor Sally Fitzgerald has performed a labor of love and an act of model scholarship. When factual information is needed, she gives it succinctly and then stands back. This record of a remarkable life is an occasion for sadness, a reminder of wisdom cut off much too soon. But the emotion that Flannery O'Connor conveyed most often was joy, and this survives intact. Once a correspondent had suggested that someone would write a life of the author. Flannery pooh-poohed the idea:

"There won't be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy." This book proves her wrong. -- Paul Gray

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